Outside the Museum of Science & Industry Wednesday, Illinois Senate President John Cullerton showed off the roomy “frunk” of his luxury sedan, which had just travelled to Normal, Ill., and back, propelled by electrons pulled from the grid at Tesla Motors’ first “supercharging” station in the Midwest.

The new station in Normal is the company’s ninth nationally, and its first that's not in California or on the East Coast. Their budding network of “superchargers” is meant to enable coast-to-coast travel by electric vehicle within just a few years. Tesla has plans to open another station in Rockford, Ill. later this year.

Tesla’s Model S can travel up to 265 miles fully charged, which from the Normal station would reach Chicago, Indianapolis, Milwaukee or St. Louis with miles to spare. The “supercharging stations” can fully charge Teslas in about 30 minutes.

The speech, given in front of the same university building George Washington spoke from in 1797, effectively embraced a narrative that many environmentalists feared had fallen on deaf ears after the demise of cap-and-trade legislation gave way to a period of relative silence and inaction on climate change. Al Gore called Obama's remarks “by far the best address on climate by any president ever.”

Critical though they may be to making important decisions in the age of big data, computer models come with one huge caveat: They aren’t real. So the Department of Energy’s new Buildings Performance Database, which contains actual data on tens of thousands of existing buildings across the country, could sweeten the pot for those looking to invest in energy efficiency.

The 65,000 buildings in the data set so far are residential and commercial, public and private, and have been made anonymous. It’s the largest free, publicly available set of information like this currently available. And DOE is inviting building owners to help it grow by submitting new data. As of this writing, Chicago’s 606- area codes were without data.

New features will come in time, but the most recent addition includes a retrofit analysis tool, which compares the likely energy savings of different retrofits.

Though they occupy the same plot of land in the southwest side neighborhood of Garfield Ridge, students from two adjacent primary schools — one public, one charter — rarely meet.

Phoebe A. Hearst Fine Arts Magnet School and the Academy for Global Citizenship share a campus at 4640 S. Lamon Ave. At their closest point the buildings almost touch, with only a 3,500 square foot asphalt corridor linking the parking lot with 46th Street between them.

On Tuesday students from both schools giddily assembled to cut the ribbon on the new garden and outdoor classroom that replaced that spit of blacktop with green space.

The project is part of nonprofit conservation group Openlands’ Building School Gardens program, which has helped create 54 gardens at schools throughout the region since 2006.

One hundred years after a small volunteer group set aside open spaces for the nation’s first Forest Preserve, the Forest Preserve District of Cook County is redoubling its efforts to promote preservation and recreation across more than 100 square miles.

The targets of their signs and chants were state governors in town for the Democratic Governors Association, meeting this week in Chicago. In addition to Gov. Pat Quinn, whose signature is expected soon on a regulatory bill passed recently by the state legislature, protestors watched for Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and California Gov.